I write about the Supreme Court, the intersection between the legal and business worlds, and occasionally about politics. I graduated from the University of Michigan Business and Law schools and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I started my career at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, a corporate law firm. After switching to journalism, I covered the corporate scandals at WorldCom and Adelphia, Eliot Spitzer, the SEC, and the Supreme Court as a reporter for the New York Law Journal. I have also written for American Lawyer Magazine and Legal Affairs Magazine, and authored Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice (Simon & Schuster). Feel free to subscribe to me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter: @mbobelian.

For decades, pollution emitted from coal plants in the Midwest and the South has wafted to Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states. The phenomena, a constant source of acrimony between these regions for many years, has triggered countless rounds of litigation. Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency have also tried to tackle the problem with little to show for efforts stretching back to the 1970s. In a 6-2 ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court may have finally put an end to the battle in approving the EPA’s regulations limiting coal plant emissions in the upwind states.

The decision in EPA v. EME Homer City Generation, authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, bolsters the EPA’s regulatory authority by giving the agency significant leeway in designing complex solutions to labyrinthine environmental problems. It also enhances the efforts by the Obama administration to rely on preexisting laws, in this case, the Clean Air Act, to tackle environmental problems without the need for additional Congressional action – a policy the president highlighted in his most recent State of the Union address.

Pollution emitted from a coal plant in Ohio doesn’t travel in a narrow path east like a truck heading down I-80. “The realities of interstate air pollution,” Ginsburg’s opinion explained, “are not so simple.” Instead, the west-to-east jet stream carrying these emissions across the United States may spread the pollutants across several Atlantic states in unequal proportions. The same goes for the pollution emitted from each of the dozens of plants targeted by the EPA. Contributing to this complexity is the fact that emissions from various plants spread across dozens of states mix together as they float eastwards. It makes the process of directly linking polluters to the recipients of their emissions a nearly impossible task.

The difficulty of addressing this complexity helped thwart the EPA’s two previous efforts in 1998 and 2005. Then in 2011, the agency established a new scheme – called the Transport Rule – to resolve the problem using cost-benefit analysis to determine how much each plant under its plan would have to reduce its emissions.

Industrial polluters have long advocated for the use of cost-benefit analysis and other economic-based concepts to determine environmental policy. It was ironic then that the plants involved in the lawsuit against the EPA (the state and local governments where these plants are located also sued the agency) would find fault with the EPA’s solution to this tangled problem. The EPA’s regulations promoted the most cost-effective means to reduce emissions and rewarded plants that have already instituted some form of emission control in the past. The latter point addressed the issue of free-riders, another principle touted by those championing economically sound regulation. Both policies relied on established economic concepts – exactly the type of approach long preached by industry groups as well as many Republicans.

The EPA’s methodology, the Court ruled, “makes good sense” when taking into account these economic factors and the intricacy of the task Congress empowered the agency to undertake.

The ruling also sanctioned the EPA’s discretionary power to come up with innovative solutions to thorny problems.

Much of Ginsburg’s opinion navigated through the Byzantine world of statutory construction and agency rule-making. Through amendments to the Clean Air Act, Congress had made it clear that it wanted the EPA to address the issue of pollution traveling from upwind states to downwind states. The statutory language remained ambiguous as to what means the EPA could use to implement the legislature’s wishes, however. “Lacking a dispositive statutory instruction to guide it,” the Court held, the EPA’s decision “is a ‘reasonable’ way to filling ‘the gap left open by Congress.’”

The Court’s approval of the EPA’s actions will strengthen the agency as it faces opposition in other areas of environment regulation, especially on topics muddled by vague statutory language or with issues like climate change that Congress was unaware of when enacting legislation decades ago.

In February, the Court heard just such a case, one in which the EPA had to contend with outdated and contradictory provisions of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases at coal power plants. Despite the differences in the details, the logic employed in EME Homer may well carry over into that ruling. If that’s the case, and the Court grants the EPA another victory over the next few weeks, it will go a long way in strengthening President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda.

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This is the the “Fulcrum” a pivotal point in for the Scales of Justice. Accountability for breaking “Good Neighbor” provisions, will be the stick needed , as apparently as the “carrot” , of self-policing and self-regulation has not changed the direction of some stakeholders. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the Majority of Supreme Court Justices have tremendous integrity , and should be commended for their strength of character, and wisdom.

The premise of Carbon Dioxide and Water as pollutants is absurd. We humans as Humans in our natural capacity expire the gases in question CO2 and H20. By this silly definition we are therefore the greatest unregulated polluters on the planet.

You’re right in that humans and animals release CO2 but at much lower levels than vehicles, power plants, and other major sources of CO2 emissions. The problem with CO2 in the atmosphere is not its existence but the thresholds it has reached.

RockyTC Mathew 7.3 “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Distracting attention away from Power-Plants 40% of all emissions and 72.3% of stationary sources redirecting attention to farts , is best described as : The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of “reasoning” has the following pattern:

Person A has position X. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X). Person B attacks position Y. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed. This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself.